


The light of hope burns brighter in the dark

by aesthete_laureate



Series: Time and Tears [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Altered Mental States, Mistaken Identity, POV Second Person, Timeline Shiftery, Unreliable Narrator, memory loss/alteration
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-12 08:48:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28882698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesthete_laureate/pseuds/aesthete_laureate
Summary: Come light of day, it may be lost."I know you on the other side of the mirror" from an alternate perspective.
Series: Time and Tears [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2118174
Kudos: 5





	The light of hope burns brighter in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> It's 1985.
> 
> I have no idea what toll the whole memory gun thing took inside his head, so this is a speculative work and exercise in writing altered mental states more than an effort to be true to canon :)

-

The sight of the cabin makes the tension go out of your shoulders, somehow, the crowd gathered in the front yard not even registering until you’re in their midst. The question of why there are twenty people on the property springs up somewhere in the back of your mind, but it’s muted, soft, not important, not as important as getting back in. 

Your key is lost. Had been lost for months at least. Two winters now. 

Your temporary little shack in the scrapyard is fine in the warm season, sure, but in the winter the public tap down the road freezes over and the last time you tried to light a fire it took half the roof off in the explosion that resulted from putting the wood glue too close to the hearth. Stupid. You knew better, it just slipped your mind for a minute. Doesn’t matter now. 

If you just catch him outside and explain, he’ll let you back in.

You get a glimpse of him up on the porch - he’s dressed up fancy for some reason. Suit and tie, it looks nice, but it’s awfully formal compared to his usual combination of a sweater and button down shirt. You smile sheepishly when his eyes sweep the crowd, wave to try and get his attention, but his eyes don’t linger on you for even a second. And that’s. Not like him. He has to recognize you, it hasn’t been that long. Just a couple of months. 

God, you hope he hasn’t tried to get the project up and running while you’ve been locked out, it’s.. it’s dangerous. That, you know for sure. The clench in your gut confirms it.

(What “it” is, exactly, you’re.. not confident about. The picture the word “project” brings to mind is a tunnel of bright blue, blinding. Your fingertips tingle with phantom static every time you think about it, and each time your stomach feels like it’s turning inside out. Foggy weightlessness, electric shock down the spine, and then just quiet darkness.)

Maybe his ignoring you has something to do with the crowd. He always gets finicky around groups of people, doesn’t like them too close to him. He’s also not wearing his glasses, so it might have been an honest mistake. Either way, you wait until everyone else starts to leave before you approach him. He says something to the trespassers, something about seeing them again soon, and you have half a mind to scold him about having too much coffee again. He always starts acting not himself after the tenth cup, it’s irresponsible. It’s not actually meant as a replacement for sleep.

“Stan,” you say, and he looks at you with a blank expression that you have no idea what to do with - but that’s his name. You’re sure of it. (There is an extra, fuzzy bit to the end of it that you can’t quite make out in your brain, another syllable that’s stuck fast to the tip of your tongue so you only say the beginning.)

“..yeah? Hello? You with me, pal?”

His hand is waving in front of your eyes before you have time to respond, and you blink rapidly a few times.

“I’m here, I, what are you doin’? Why’re you dressed like that?”

His familiar blue eyes narrow in what your mind sluggishly categorizes as confusion, and he takes a step back from you, toward the door. Your heart stops in your chest, just for a second, and you’re so scared he's going to leave you stranded outside again that the click of the lock barely breaks through the haze of your mind.

But it does - it does, it just takes a second. 

He’s locked you out again. 

It’s, um. It’s no problem. Nah, no big thing. Maybe he’s had a rough day, maybe he’s still upset with you. (Why was he upset with you? You can’t remember. Something about the basement - the feeling like you’re in a car that’s rolling on the freeway, accompanied by a stabbing headache.) At least now you know he’s here. 

You’ll just, try again tomorrow.

-

He says he’ll get you a cup of coffee. And that’s just like him. 

To your surprise, he doesn’t open the front door to the cabin - instead he leads you into the side attachment (and you can’t recall if this is a new addition, or if this little storage area had always been there, you lose things in the back of your mind all the time these days) and sits you right down behind the counter. 

Upon further investigation, it’s a checkout counter, like one in a grocery store, and this development earns Stan a quizzical look. He’s not selling out, is he? Literally, selling his research, you mean, and that’s actually not a bad joke. It makes you smile.

(You used to make more jokes. You used to have a good wit about you, back before.. before whatever happened with the project.)

You can’t help the grimace that wipes the smile off your face when he places a cup of black coffee down in front of you, and, well, you may as well get it over with. The taste is something that never quite managed to grow on you, and the caffeine just makes you shake like a strung-out aspen instead of giving you any energy. But if he’s willing to get back to work, that must mean he’s not too upset anymore, and you’ll do your part to help smooth things back over.

He sits down on the other side of the counter, and he’s talking, but you can’t pay attention to his exact words. Not that you don’t try, you’re just distracted. He hardly touches his own coffee cup, which is unlike him, and his voice sounds different.

You can’t pin down what’s different about it. It’s still deep, and he’s got the same cadence. The rhythm of his words is right, but the vocabulary isn’t. He’s soft on his ‘r’s in a way you don’t recognize. There’s a distinctly gravelly quality, one that suggests he may have picked up a smoking habit in the time you’ve been apart.

“..just ‘cause you know my name doesn’t mean I know or want to know yours.” The end of his rambling is the only part that really computes in your brain, and the strange declaration makes a little bit of the haze lift from your mind. 

He cuts deep when he wants to, that’s for sure. Maybe the whole thing hasn’t blown over yet after all. You stare at the cup cradled in your hands, and mutter under your breath, “Fiddleford. Hadron,” but he doesn’t grace you with much of a reply. He just drones on again, and his voice lifts and falls in all the right places but the structure of his sentences is wrong and you can’t focus on anything else other than that.

That is, until he asks about your family. And then it’s like a shock goes through you, something snaps into place in your head and it hurts like when you turn too quickly, and the world is thrown into sharp relief for a second, and the second seems to last an eternity. Family. Yes. You have one of those. 

Words flash behind your eyes: wife, baby - no - son. Palo Alto- it's forty minutes out from San Francisco. You’re trying to call your wife, she’s back home in California. Your business is floundering, she’d tried to help at first but she’s getting frustrated, Tate started kindergarten, he would really like it if you’d come home to visit, you want to go home and visit, she’s not been picking up recently, how do you spell California, does it have two ‘l’s? Flash of light and comforting dark and no-no, no, wait--

“Family, yeah, Caroline.”

-

The basement floor is cold on your back as you lay there, staring sightlessly into the space above you, clutching your stomach as your chest convulses, there’s no air in your lungs. There’s also nothing in your stomach but it’s trying to empty itself anyway. Bile stings the back of your throat. 

You slowly come to the realization that the fluttering sensation in your arms and legs is the frantic racing of your heart, and you feel sick, the kind of sick where the very bones of you ache. The splitting pain in your head registers next, and that quickly becomes so intense it whites your vision out for the most part.

It’s a while, but when you recover your eyesight again Stanford is standing over you, his brow creased slightly, and the large metal frame behind him fizzles with some kind of static. Bright blue. It stings your eyes. You can still feel it in your fingertips, feel it making your scalp prickle. 

Something went wrong. 

Sitting up is hard, but you manage it eventually, reaching up to push your hair out of your face with one shaky hand. 

“What happened?” you ask, looking up at him, and he. Won’t look at you. 

He’s got his arms crossed behind his back, in the way that makes him look regal and important, and his voice is coolly detached when he answers, “I don’t think this is going to work out.”

“Wh-what happened?” is all you can respond with, asking about the experiment despite the fact your heart is trying to claw its way up your throat. And when you try to stand up, your vision whites out again - and you see mocking, mirthful eyes, glowing yellow, and a tear in the sky, and the earth cracked clean down to the core, and when you open your eyes again you’re on your knees and Stanford is looking at you with something like disgust. 

You wonder how you look, right now.

He sighs, then, turning away from you fully to face the now-empty circular chassis, “I think you should gather your things and go. You’re not cut out for this, you only jeopardize the project. I can’t afford that risk anymore.”

The rolling of your stomach hardens into something cold, sharp, and there’s suddenly ice in your veins instead of static. 

“I didn’t know, I didn’t mean to-” you clamber to your feet and stumble, try to reach out for him, to touch his shoulder, but he turns sharply away. “Ford, I-”

“Go.”

You go. 

But.

No. 

That’s not right, that’s not how it went. 

Not really.

**Author's Note:**

> Dòchas and Dorchas, the Scottish words for “hope” and “darkness”, are near homophones and I thought that was Spiffy so that’s what inspired the title :)


End file.
